Defining the workgroup objectives

[Gerrit Pape]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2005 at 05:58:56PM +0200, a-aa wrote:
> In my opinion, if your gonna reinvent the init.d files, dont use
> runscript, it's lacking a few important things.
I don't think so, and can tell from experience.

> It for example does exec program --no-fork (or similar) isn't a great
> solution.  Most applications using pidfiles or forking are ready when

It's a good thing: you have service daemons running under a parent
process exactly knowing the process id of the service daemon, no need
for pid files; you have a well-defined interface to control the daemons
through the parent, even with different privileges; you have a
guaranteed process state for the service daemons, regardless whether
they start at boot time, or start or restart anytime while the system is
up; see http://smarden.org/runit/benefits.html

> they've forked and the pidfile is up, so using --no-fork isn't a good
> dependable way to start them in parallel, because there is no real way
> of knowing when they are actually started.

Actually --no-fork isn't an additional task to do, it's doing less;
simply skipping fork, detach, exec.  pid files also are unnecessary when
running under a parent, again less to code to write or run.  What about
knowing when they actually terminate?, the parent knows.

You might be interested in this web page
 http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/unix-daemon-design-mistakes-to-avoid.html

Regards, Gerrit.
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